The Tzitzimime grandmother of Mayahuel recognized her as part of the tree. She ripped Mayahuel from the tree and fed her to the other demons. Quetzalcóatl, in sorrow, buried what was left of his beautiful Mayahuel and from her sprang the maguey plant that produces the intoxicating pulque. This gift brings joy to humans as Quetzalcóatl's and Mayahuel's love brought joy to each other.

If the Aztec gods drank pulque, in my mind it was the reason for their defeat by the Spanish God. The fray drank it when there was no vino to quench his thirst; he claims that unfermented it had the taste of rancid meat, but I still say it is as foul as the vomitó swamps.

The indios thrived upon it and even fed it to their children. The Aztecs were not tolerant of drunkenness but some indulgence was shown toward old people on the grounds that their blood was running cold. Besides the old, women in the days following childbirth and the sick were given the tonic to strengthen them. But adults found publicly drunk would have their hair cut off as punishment the first time, their houses demolished the second, and be put to death on the third. Dios mio! If the alcalde did this in Veracruz, there would be no indios or half-castes left in a week.

The fray found much sadness in the state of indio drunkenness. "They drink to forget their miseries," he often said. "And they drink differently from whites. My español hermanos think about the amount they consume. More the pity, indios drink for the occasion without considering the amount. They drink on Sundays, festival days, weddings, and other special occasions. And when they drink, they pour it down their throats until their minds have been captured by the heavenly waters and their bodies are pickled. It is said one indio could drink for a dozen Spaniards." He shook his finger at me. "This is no exaggeration, Bastardo. My brothers of the cloth say that drink is the wellspring of all indio vices. But why was this vice not widespread until we washed upon their shores?"

The fray threw his hands up in aggravation as he often did when religious doctrine conflicted with what he saw with his own eyes. "Sunday has become a day of public drunkenness for the indios. Why? Because it is their way of protesting the religion we have forced upon them. Did you know that a holy cross near the marketplace had to be removed because dogs and drunken indios urinated upon it?"

If drinking is so much a problem with the indios, one wonders why the Spanish masters did so much to profit upon it. The great maguey fields are owned by the hacendados. And it is said that Spanish wines cause the indios to lose their heads faster than pulque. These potent wines were brought to the villages by traveling Spanish traders, who find not only that the sale of the wine lines their pockets, but that indios can be persuaded to give up their land and gold when there is enough wine between their ears.

To the indio, pulque takes one to the threshold of the sacred; and along with corn, maguey is their staff of life. Perhaps there is something mystically akin to the Aztecs about the plant; it dies after flowering, which is what happened to the short-lived Aztec Empire.

My stomach growled irritably. It had been hours since I had eaten the tortilla with the volcanic peppers. The only nourishment available, without spending my treasure of two reales and a few cocoa beans, was pulque. My hunger would drive me to consume it raw... if I could not steal a fermented brew.

I knew from my trip with the fray to a village church on a maguey hacienda that indios who tended the fields often had a cache of the juice fermenting out of sight of the hacendado's overseers. I looked over the field and asked myself where I would have hid the contraband myself. Not in the large, bare, dirt areas between the plants, certainly. It would be hidden in the bushes, far enough in to be out of sight, but not so far that the bushes overgrew it.

Ay, with the eye of a well-practiced thief, I surveyed the lay of the land and began walking along what I considered to be the best candidates for a cache. It took me longer than I thought, a half an hour to find a clay pot of fermented pulque, but I attributed the excessive time not to any error in my plan of search but the ignorance of the indio who did not hide it as cleverly as I would have.

Soon after the pulque went down my throat, a warmth kindled in my belly that spread throughout my body. It was going to be cool tonight sleeping on the ground with only my manta for a blanket, so I drank a little more of the drink of the gods to help keep me warm.

Returning to camp, I went back to my spot under the conifer and sat with my back to the trunk. My head was spinning a bit, but my spirits were lifted. I thanked the Plumed Serpent for lightening my burdens.

A sugarcane hacendado had camped nearby with three of his vaqueros and an africano slave. A large fire shared with some other español travelers had been built. From the light of it I could see that the slave, a young, husky male, had been badly beaten. One side of his face was swollen, his right eye shut, and his ragged clothes were bloody and slashed by a whip. I had seen many africanos, indios, and half-castes beaten by their masters in a like manner. Violence and terror were how the few always subjugate the many.

I half-closed my eyes and listened as the slave owner, whose sugarcane hacienda lay east of Veracruz, talked to another spur wearer about the slave.

"An escapado," he said. "It took us three days to run him down. Now I'm going to take him back and flog him again in front of my other slaves. When I'm finished with him, no one will ever run away again."

"The countryside's full of runaways, maroons, who rob, rape, and murder every Spaniard they can get their hands on," the other man said.

As they talked, I realized I had seen the plantation owner before. He came to church occasionally in Veracruz. I knew him to be a brutal, stupid person, thick-chested, thick-necked, a hairy, hombre malo who liked to castrate male slaves, rape slave women, and flog everybody in sight. His reputation, even among his own people, was that of evil incarnate. I had had occasion to go to church—which I did whenever the fray berated me enough—when once this slave owner had appeared with a male slave, a boy about my own age, whom he had beaten savagely for some infraction. Qué diablo! He'd brought the boy to church naked, the boy's mouth gaping open, his pene bouncing, dragging him from a rope fastened to a dog collar.

When I told the fray, he said that the man would burn in hell. "Hate boils inside some people and comes to the surface by cruelty to others. This man hates people with black skin. He owns slaves to abuse them. He organized a Santa Hermandad, a militia of local swords to support the king's law, but in truth they are nothing more than men who hunt runaway slaves like others hunt deer."

I thought about the fray's words as I listened to the man loudly boast about all of the runaways he had tracked down and the africano women he'd sexually assaulted. What would it feel like to be a madman's slave, a man who could beat you at will and rape your wife on a whim? Who could kill you when he got the urge?

"This one claims to be a prince in his own country," the slave owner laughed. He picked up a rock and threw it, hitting the tied-up slave with it. "Eat that for dinner, Prince Yanga." He roared again with laughter.

"He's a tough one," the other Spaniard said.

"Not after I geld him."

No por Dios! Castración!

I glanced at the slave, and he stared blankly at me. He already knew his fate. But as I continued to look at him and his brown eyes met mine, I saw both intelligence and pain. Not just the pain of his bruises, but a much deeper hurt. His eyes told me that he was no animal but a man. That he, too, was human!